Partial RAID-1 mounting

I recently (read: ages ago) needed to bring my RAID1 disks to a friend, and it seemed silly for a mirrored disk array to bring more than 1 harddisk. Surely a single harddisk would cover it? Mount it read-only and away we go.

Let's take /dev/sdb1 drive of an array {/dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1}.

The simplest way is to just start up the raid array using mdadm with a single disk². But for some reason I failed to get this to work.

One way to do it (according to [1]), is to assume that the raidarray uses ext4 as an underlying filesystem and then just fiddle with the offsets.

The command "mdadm --examine /dev/sdb1" shows "Data Offset : 262144 sectors".

Then create a loop device, starting from that offset multiplied by the mdadm sector size (512).

losetup --find --show --read-only --offset $((262144*512)) /dev/sdb1

Than, simply mount the loop device.

mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/raid1/

References

[1] StackExchange - How to mount/recover data on a disk that was part of a mdadm raid 1 on another machine?

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/64889/how-to-mount-recover-data-on-a-disk-that-was-part-of-a-mdadm-raid-1-on-another-m

[2] sleeplessbeastie's notes - How to mount software RAID1 member using mdadm

https://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2012/05/08/how-to-mount-software-raid1-member-using-mdadm/